Paintings Worth Looking At

(Author’s note: This hefty chunk of research dates back to July, but was delayed. Certain materials are still absent. So the mystery's a bit inconclusive, but the rest is perfectly readable.) Let’s start with the theft. Or maybe it was a gift. It could’ve been a perfectly legitimate off-the-record sale, or a simple mishap. Maybe it simply fell off the wall, landed in someone’s pocket by mistake, and walked out on its own, with everyone else none the wiser. Who are we to say, centuries later? All we can say is that, from 1732 to 1915, the Anthony Van Dyck painting of Dr. Baldwin Hamey, Junior, disappeared from the record entirely. 

In which Hamey Junior is slightly unhelpful. Well done, Balduinus Hamey M.D. Socio et Benefactore Collegii Medicorum Londinensis. But a shorter title might have sufficed. - - - As we know well, in past centuries, it was common practice for erudite and scholarly British individuals to write in dead languages. They intended to demonstrate their sophistication and mastery of Greco-Roman culture, not just to confound modern researchers, despite how it may seem. Baldwin Hamey Junior , that great fan of Aristophanes and Virgil, is the usual culprit, especially when grappling with his hefty tome “Bustorum aliquot Reliquae,” an index of sentimental eulogies in immaculate Latin. Which is very ironic, considering my own background in the classics, but I think Hamey’s got me beat.

In which the portrait of the father is recycled for the son. - - - These two pictures are oddly similar. As usual, that’s no coincidence.  Last time on the Hamey Channel, we discussed a big-name painter, Cornelius Johnson. Today, we’ll focus on a small name: Matthew Snelling, a little-known miniaturist.  Snelling is remembered for his portrait of Hamey and not much else. (The record of the picture cites the artist as “Matthew (?) Snelling,” granting him even less dignity.) “Baldvinus Hamey M.D.”, shown on the left, captures the good doctor at age 74, pictured with those timeless hallmarks of the medical profession: a dashing cap, several gigantic books, and the marble busts of his favorite ancient authors, which he strokes lovingly like a household pet. 

This is a cautionary tale. Not on my part, thankfully (at least not yet), but on the danger of leaping to conclusions.   The Baldwin Hamey portraits are an incredibly convoluted story involving at least five separate paintings (some lost, some found), which may or may not actually depict the same man and/or his extremely similar son. In fact, the prospect of untangling this whole thing is so spectacularly complex that it hasn’t been done yet. But let’s give it a shot anyway. The portrait known as Baldwin Hamey, Senior (on the right), is an astoundingly high-quality painting. It stands head and shoulders above standard formulaic portraiture of the era (pun not intended). It’s so good for its time, in fact, that I initially wondered if it had been mislabeled on ArtUK, but it’s credibly inscribed as 1633 and bears the Hamey family coat of arms. Its artistic authorship is a tantalizing, compelling mystery. 

In which a mysterious floating head is reattached to a Dutch nobleman, and a grandson copies his grandfather to impersonate him postmortem. It started out, back then, as “Portrait That Has Something A Bit Off.”  This humble yet striking picture originally turned up on a stock photo website , uploaded — in the infinite wisdom of automatic titling — as “Man In Black Jacket Holding White Plastic Tube.”  It’s a mystery where a gentleman from 1648 in the Netherlands might have got hold of plastic.  So I stashed it in my digital notes, with the aforementioned label. There is something a bit off: it’s remarkably good. Despite the gap in centuries, the man feels relatable. He tiredly and wistfully gazes out of his frame, choked by his stifling starched ruff. (Some sitters wear the ruff. For other sitters, the ruff wears them.) Fashion aside, it’s clearly a picture of great quality. The execution is intricate, the brushwork precise, the fabric crisply and delicately rendered. The...